Related papers: Efficiency of autonomous soft nano-machines at max…
We introduce heat engines working in the nano-regime that allow to extract a finite amount of deterministic work. We show that the efficiency of these cycles is strictly smaller than Carnot's, and we associate this difference with a…
The Carnot engine sets an upper limit to the efficiency of a practical heat engine. An arbitrary irreversible engine is sometimes believed to behave closely as the Curzon-Ahlborn engine. Efficiency of the latter is obtained commonly by…
From the steam engine to current nano-devices, the design of efficient thermal machines has been instrumental in modern societies. In its essence a thermal engine can be thought as a working substance, in contact with two or more baths,…
Thermodynamics at the nanoscale is known to differ significantly from its familiar macroscopic counterpart: the possibility of state transitions is not determined by free energy alone, but by an infinite family of free-energy-like…
Molecular motors convert chemical energy into mechanical work while operating in an environment dominated by Brownian motion. The aim of this paper is to explore the flow of energy between the molecular motors and its surroundings, in…
In this paper, we introduce a real symmetric and positive semi-definite matrix, which we call the non-equilibrium conductance matrix, and which generalizes the Onsager response matrix for a system in a non-equilibrium stationary state. We…
Chemical affinities are responsible for driving active matter systems out of equilibrium. At the nano-scale, molecular machines interact with the surrounding environment and are subjected to external forces. The mechano-chemical coupling…
The thermodynamic uncertainty relation provides an inequality relating any mean current, the associated dispersion and the entropy production rate for arbitrary non-equilibrium steady states. Applying it here to a general model of a…
We derive upper and lower bounds for the efficiency of an isothermal molecular machine operating at maximum power. The upper bound is reached when the activated state is close to the fueling or reactant state (Eyring-like), while the lower…
Fluctuations strongly affect the dynamics and functionality of nanoscale thermal machines. Recent developments in stochastic thermodynamics have shown that fluctuations in many far-from-equilibrium systems are constrained by the rate of…
Electric machines with very power-to-weight ratios are inevitable for hybrid electric aircraft applications. One potential technology that is very promising to achieve the required power-to-weight ratio for short-range aircraft, are…
Quantum thermodynamic relationships in emerging nanodevices are significant but often complex to deal with. The application of machine learning in quantum thermodynamics has provided a new perspective. This study employs reinforcement…
Surface interactions provide a class of mechanisms which can be employed for propulsion of micro- and nanometer sized particles. We investigate the related efficiency of externally and self-propelled swimmers. A general scaling relation is…
We want to understand whether and to which extent the maximal (Carnot) efficiency for heat engines can be reached at a finite power. To this end we generalize the Carnot cycle so that it is not restricted to slow processes. We show that for…
Thermodynamics places a limit on the efficiency of heat engines, but not on their output power or on how the power and efficiency change with the engine's cycle time. In this manuscript, we develop a geometrical description of the power and…
With increasing numbers of mobile robots arriving in real-world applications, more robots coexist in the same space, interact, and possibly collaborate. Methods to provide such systems with system size scalability are known, for example,…
We study the thermodynamic efficiency of a nano-sized photo-electric device and show that at maximum power output, the efficiency is bounded from above by a result closely related to the Curzon-Ahlborn efficiency. We find that this upper…
We derive the statistics of the efficiency under the assumption that thermodynamic fluxes fluctuate with normal law, parametrizing it in terms of time, macroscopic efficiency, and a coupling parameter $\zeta$. It has a peculiar behavior: No…
We analyze the efficiency of thermal engines (either quantum or classical) working with a single heat reservoir like atmosphere. The engine first gets an energy intake, which can be done in arbitrary non-equilibrium way e.g. combustion of…
A cyclically operating chemical engine is considered that converts chemical energy into mechanical work. The working fluid is a gas of finite-sized spherical particles interacting through elastic hard collisions. For a generic transport law…